While we select stocks using a bottom-up investment approach, in
general the commodities space continues to be attractive to us.
Food prices have gone up and are likely to stay up for some time.
To some extent, bad weather has been a cause for the rise in
prices, but from a longer-term perspective, increasing demand for
food, particularly from India and China, means we may have to
live with higher food prices unless farm productivity increases
dramatically. This is one of the reasons we are looking very
closely at investments in Ukraine, a country that is famous for
agriculture and its fertile “black earth”. Operations there are not limited to wheat, corn
and other crops but also extend to dairy and meat production.
Meanwhile in Brazil, we are looking at food processing
businesses.

In fact, Eastern Europe could be full of opportunities:

Stocks run ahead of reality on the ground and that certainly is
what happened in Eastern Europe. However, we are still looking
very closely at the region; we are finding opportunities in
Russia, but we are not ignoring other markets like Poland,
Hungary, and the Czech Republic. As you may know, we also
recently began a large operation in Romania. It is still early,
but I think there will be a time when the stock prices of
companies in those countries are going to look attractive despite
the possible debt problems of their governments. We are not
counting Eastern Europe out completely because we believe there
could be an opportunity to go in and invest for the long-term.